Every business needs an online presence nowadays, and at the centre of this is the trusty website. Web pages are ideal for showcasing a company brand and reaching out to a wide audience (potential customers), or in terms of a recruitment business, a large talent pool (potential candidates to fill advertised vacancies). If you have a recruitment business and you do not have a website then you are potentially losing out on a number of great opportunities. In saying this, here are a few reasons why your recruitment business needs a website:
A website is a basic need for any recruitment business
One of the most important start-up costs for any recruitment business is a website. We live in a digital world, so having an online business platform is essential. Jobseekers are constantly hunting for vacancies online and recruiters want to post online to keep up with this digital trend.
A recruitment website acts as a 24/7 salesperson
While it may take a little while to design and set-up a website, once it is up and running it acts as your own personal, online, salesperson who is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; they are always accessible since they are constantly active.
Websites are a form of low-cost advertising, so recruitment businesses can promote jobs to candidates while marketing themselves (their brand) for a small fee. It for these reasons that websites are considered a significant part of a business’ marketing strategy, and there are a few points to remember when marketing your company through this online platform:
- Website Development – The way you package your website has a direct impact on whether internet users will continue to use, or click off and never return to, your site. The design and layout of a recruitment website should represent your company brand while also take into consideration the user navigation experience. Jobseekers should be able to easily search and apply for jobs, while recruiters should be able to easily post a job, so it would be useful to have these calls-to-actions (CTA) on the homepage. On top of all this, it is also important to make sure that your site can load fast. Websites, according to a study carried out by Google, should take no more than 3 seconds to load, as otherwise users will get bored and click off.
- Brand Image – This is linked to the above point. A brand image is the impression that customers form about your brand. Websites help to create this image, so care has to be taken when building recruitment websites. If you have a poor brand image, your traffic rates are likely to decrease and your site will not succeed in the online recruitment market.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – This marketing technique is all about attempting to improve the visibility (ranking) of your website on search engines. If you want to be one of the first recruitment websites to appear on search pages when internet users search for such sites, – and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want that, – then you will need to do some research, keyword research to be exact. Think about which words are important in the recruitment sector, which ones are searched the most. Embedding such keywords into the title pages and headings of your site will further help with search engine rankings.
- Niche – It is important to consider what makes your site stand out from other recruitment business websites. In short, what is it that makes your business different from competitors? Defining your unique selling point (USP) will help you to stand out amongst the crowd.
A recruitment website acts as your own personalised job board
In creating your own recruitment website you are essentially creating your own job board, and this is beneficial to your business because there are some things that you can do on your website that you cannot do on top job boards.
For one, recruiters are limited in how they advertise jobs on job boards. There tends to be a specific design and layout, i.e. when it comes to describing and presenting your vacancies on the job description page, that job board companies want recruiters to stick to. With your own recruitment website you have the freedom to advertise jobs as you please, and you even have the chance to customise the candidate experience!
Another personal touch that you can add to your unique “job board” is that you can add pages dedicated to your company. Job boards tend to only let recruiters have a small “about” section or company profile; sometimes recruiters only have space for a one line description. With a recruitment website, you have the control over how much you want to say about your company. You can have pages dedicated to your company vision, mission and values with accompanying images and/or videos of your company culture – all of which may help to encourage candidates to apply for your advertised role and be a part of your company.
Key Features that every Recruitment Website Needs
- Job search – This is one of the most integral parts of a recruitment website and it should be clearly displayed on your homepage. Jobseekers come to recruitment websites for this exact purpose – to search and hopefully apply for jobs, so make sure it is highly visible.
- Job alerts – Every recruitment website should offer job alerts. The service enables companies to interact with their users through email – it lets users know when new jobs, ones which are similar to the roles they have previously searched, have been added to the site – and encourage them to come back and use the site.
- Ease of application / Ease of posting – Recruitment is a fast-moving market: jobseekers want to find and obtain a job quickly and without fuss, and the same can be said for recruiters who want to post jobs. Both activities should be able to be done with the click of a button.
- A Blog – Not many recruitment businesses realise the benefits of this medium. Blogs can help your website to move up the Google search-ranking ladder and attract traffic. They also give recruitment businesses the chance to publish content that positions them as thought leaders in the recruitment sector. In other words, recruiters can kind of boast about what their company does and share their knowledge and opinions about the recruitment industry.
- A Newsletter – This is another medium that helps to bring users back to your site. By offering newsletter subscriptions, both jobseekers and recruiters can be kept up to date about any important information about your site and be reminded about your brand.
- Mobile optimisation – With the help of mobile phones, recruitment websites can now be viewed whilst people are on the move. Not everyone has access to a desktop, so optimising your website for mobiles is thus likely to increase your user rates and, since sites are ranked by how fast they load on mobiles, your ranking on search engines. The first step is to make sure that your website design is responsive; it needs to be optimised for devices, i.e. mobiles and/or iPads, of different screen sizes.
- Social media integration – Social recruiting has made a big impact on the way recruiters engage candidates. Most social media platforms, e.g. Twitter and Facebook, enable free exposure, job posting and candidate attraction, so it is best to say that it might be worth creating a few profiles and include links to these on your site. Remember: external links, that is sites that link back to your recruitment website, help to boost site ranking. You may also want to include a sharing widget within each job description.
The Rise of Google for Jobs
Google have come up with a new job search feature – Google for Jobs. A product of Cloud Jobs API – a system that Google introduced in 2016; it uses machine learning to understand how job titles and skills relate to one another and the jobseeker’s preferences – the technology collects over a million job posts from all over the web and sorts them accordingly in order to simplify the job hunting process for jobseekers. However, the service does not just benefit candidates, as recruiters can also reap the benefits: it allows job posts to surface higher in job searches. The jobs on your recruitment website will be advertised alongside those on job boards. No recruitment site is better than another; Google for Jobs does not discriminate. Optimising your recruitment website for Google Jobs may therefore be another feature that you might want to invest in.
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Wave help consultancies attract better quality candidates and have been working within the recruitment marketing and media buying industry for nearly 20 years. Our aim is and always has been to support recruiters through the entire candidate attraction lifecycle. Our core offering comprises of recruitment website builds, media buying on all job boards and multi-posting and advertising analytics.
If you want to find out more about how Wave can help you, get in touch or have a read of our blog posts.
